Ontopical, Inc. – IT staffing for a Canadian GovTech SaaS

Elen Muradian

Last updated on October 3, 2025 | 13 min read

Introduction

Ontopical Inc., a Canadian SaaS company in the GovTech space, needed to expand its product team to support growing demand from municipal clients. DevsData LLC was brought in to deliver experienced engineers and design talent on a tight timeline. The collaboration quickly scaled into a multi-role engagement, covering a senior full-stack developer, a React specialist, a product manager, and a graphic designer.

Client Profile

Ontopical Inc. is a Canadian SaaS company operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence and public sector intelligence. Their platform monitors and analyzes unstructured municipal data, such as council agendas, planning documents, and meeting minutes, providing early signals to organizations about upcoming public projects, policy shifts, and business opportunities. The tool is used by clients across North America to identify leads and navigate complex local government processes with greater clarity and speed.

The company’s core strength lies in its ability to apply AI and natural language processing to fragmented, decentralized data sources. By structuring this data into actionable insights, Ontopical Inc. fills a critical gap for industries that depend on early-stage policy visibility, including infrastructure, telecommunications, and real estate. This positioning in the growing GovTech sector has attracted a steady pipeline of new clients, putting pressure on the product team to continuously evolve and scale the platform.

With around 25 employees and $2.5 million in annual revenue, Ontopical Inc. operates with a lean structure where every team member plays a pivotal role. Growth plans demanded rapid expansion of their technical and design capacity, but without compromising quality. This need for speed, specialization, and close team integration shaped the company’s decision to bring in external support for talent acquisition.

Highlights:

• SaaS platform enabling real-time monitoring of municipal government activity.
• Uses AI and natural language processing to structure unindexed public data.
• Lean, high-performing team where each role supports core product delivery and growth.

Challenge: Scaling Without Disruption

Ontopical Inc. was navigating the complex world of GovTech, where hiring technical talent isn’t just competitive – it’s strategic. Each role directly influenced delivery timelines for municipal clients, meaning delayed hires could jeopardize regulatory deadlines and funding windows tied to public projects. AI and NLP skills are particularly scarce, with 2024 data showing a 50% hiring gap across all AI positions, and many candidates command premium compensation or are swiftly recruited by larger tech firms. Ontopical Inc. needed senior engineers and niche specialists quickly, as every unfilled role threatened to delay critical public sector roadmap milestones.

Compounding the challenge were GovTech-specific constraints. Candidates had to demonstrate not only advanced AI‑driven analytics experience, but also rigorous adherence to security and ethical standards, as responsible data governance and compliance with privacy regulations like Canada’s PIPEDA. Moreover, the hiring process needed to balance algorithmic screening tools with human‑led assessments to ensure transparency and cultural alignment, key requirements in public sector settings.

With a relatively small internal team, Ontopical Inc. lacked the bandwidth to conduct multi‑channel sourcing, design AI‑proof evaluation frameworks, and run fast-paced cycles without sacrificing candidate quality. Each role required a tailor‑made outreach and assessment strategy. The company needed a partner who could inject recruitment best practices, like marketing‑oriented job descriptions, calibrated ATS and AI screening, and structured behavioral panel interviews, while ensuring ongoing compliance and candidate engagement.

Goals

Ontopical Inc. aimed to strengthen its product development capacity while maintaining the integrity and agility of a compact team. The objective was not simply to increase headcount, but to bring in senior-level professionals capable of functioning autonomously, with the goal of reducing their onboarding time to under three weeks. The hires would contribute to key product features – many of which touch sensitive municipal data pipelines, so both technical proficiency and contextual awareness were essential.

In addition to engineering talent, Ontopical Inc. sought to enhance its UX and product alignment through a senior graphic designer and an experienced product manager. This created an additional complexity in coordinating cross-functional workflows and aligning multiple delivery timelines without overloading the lean internal team. These roles required cross-functional capabilities, an understanding of civic user journeys, and the ability to contribute to design systems used by public-facing platforms. Beyond the technical fit, each candidate needed to align with the company’s mission and values, especially around responsible AI and data governance. Equally important, Ontopical looked for a comprehensive approach to this diverse set of needs, seeking a partner capable of delivering both technical and non-technical specialists under one coordinated process.

Ontopical Inc. set out to scale its product development capacity without compromising team agility, focusing on senior hires who could deliver quality and accountability from day one.

A major goal was to streamline the hiring process, reducing internal load while improving the quality of hire. This included not only sourcing top-tier candidates but also designing a vetting process that mirrored Ontopical Inc.’s product standards: structured, fair, and optimized for clarity and speed.

Our Approach

To meet the challenge, DevsData LLC deployed a two-track recruitment model built around the dual needs of technical rigor and cultural compatibility. We began by refining the job briefs in close collaboration with Ontopical Inc.’s team, focusing on role-specific success markers within a GovTech context, such as handling sensitive datasets, understanding civic workflows, working within policy-driven environments, and ensuring seamless collaboration with cross-functional teams.

Our sourcing strategy emphasized targeted outreach over broad recruiting. We engaged senior professionals with backgrounds in AI-driven SaaS, CivicTech, or adjacent regulatory domains, such as candidates with experience in telecommunications or real estate technology, prioritizing those who had worked in environments requiring ethical data practices or public-sector integrations. Outreach messaging was personalized and reflected Ontopical Inc.’s values, clarity, public impact, and trustworthiness, resulting in stronger engagement and lower drop-off during later stages.

Notably, our prior experience recruiting senior engineers for The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s most recognized publishers, informed our approach. In that engagement, we navigated a similarly high-stakes environment with zero-margin-for-error systems and tight timelines. This gave us valuable insight into sourcing top Canadian talent and structuring fast, reliable hiring processes that preserve operational continuity, including implementing a fast-track screening protocol that reduced time-to-offer to under 14 days, which we adapted for Ontopical Inc. to accelerate shortlist delivery and minimize delays in their public-sector product roadmap – a playbook we adapted to Ontopical Inc.’s GovTech context.

Importantly, we embedded fairness into the process architecture from the start. This included anonymized technical challenges where applicable, behavioral interviews conducted by mixed-gender panels, and scorecard-based evaluations. These elements helped ensure candidate assessments were both consistent and reflective of the accountability standards common in GovTech hiring environments.

Execution and Delivery

We initiated the engagement by delivering the first candidate shortlists within three business days. Each submission included a structured evaluation summary, outlining not just technical experience but also ethical considerations, communication approach, and sector-specific relevance. For example, engineers who had previously built features for platforms handling citizen data were flagged for priority consideration.

Candidates went through a two-stage screening process. The first round assessed problem-solving and system design, while the second focused on practical implementation and contextual reasoning, such as how a candidate would approach change-tracking in government agendas or build accessible UI for public-sector users. This was followed by a behavioral panel interview emphasizing collaboration, professional ethics, and transparency in decision-making.

Within just three business days, Ontopical Inc. received its first candidate shortlists, each backed by structured evaluations highlighting technical expertise and public-sector relevance.

Throughout the process, DevsData LLC maintained tight coordination with Ontopical Inc.’s leadership, facilitating same-day feedback loops and weekly calibration calls to align on candidate quality, market feedback, and sourcing strategy. Ultimately, we successfully filled four key roles: a full stack engineer, a React specialist, a product manager, and a graphic designer, within four months. Several of the placements have since transitioned into team leads, and DevsData LLC continues to support Ontopical Inc. on a retained search basis for future expansion.

Outcome

Over a four-month period, DevsData LLC successfully delivered four high-caliber professionals to Ontopical Inc. While the original plan was to hire three programmers, the client expanded their scope after evaluating the candidates and recognizing a strong fit both technically and operationally. This outcome reflected not only the quality of the applicants but also the effectiveness of the collaboration and communication throughout the process.

Despite the complexity of the search, driven by the narrow talent pool, domain-specific requirements, and Ontopical Inc.’s lean internal structure, the engagement remained on track from kickoff through final placement, with a 100% interview-to-hire ratio for the final candidate pool. The client reported a seamless onboarding experience and noted that the new hires quickly became integral to ongoing development efforts. In post-hire feedback, Ontopical Inc. emphasized that each candidate brought a level of ownership, adaptability, and sector awareness that closely aligned with the company’s goals.

The recruitment process has since become a reference model for future technical hiring at Ontopical Inc. Beyond the immediate results, the partnership laid the foundation for a more structured and scalable hiring strategy that the company can apply as it continues to grow.

Highlights:

• Four hires completed in four months, exceeding the original target due to candidate quality.
• Candidates valued by clients for domain alignment, technical strength, and team integration.
• The structured process created a long-term blueprint for technical talent acquisition.

What’s Next?

With demand for municipal intelligence tools rising, Ontopical Inc. is expected to expand its product capabilities and client base across new regions in North America. As the company introduces additional features driven by AI and data visualization, the need for specialized engineering and design talent will likely increase. DevsData LLC remains involved as a long-term recruitment partner, supporting strategic roles and advising on scaling hiring infrastructure.

Future collaboration will focus on niche technical areas such as AI integration, data privacy workflows, and public-sector UX (e.g., designers with a background in government digital services), along with continued support in product and engineering functions. Having built a foundation of trust and delivery consistency, DevsData LLC is positioned to contribute to Ontopical Inc.’s broader growth plans as the company strengthens its role in the GovTech ecosystem.

Building GovTech solutions that demand both speed and precision? Let’s design a recruitment process that delivers senior talent without slowing your roadmap. Connect with DevsData LLC, email us at general@devsdata.com, or visit our website at www.devsdata.com.